1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a heating device, an erasing device, an information recording and erasing device, and a transfer device, and more particularly to a heating device heating a thermal medium, an erasing device erasing the information recorded on a thermal recording medium, an information recording and erasing device recording and erasing the information on a thermal recording medium, and a transfer device transferring a coating agent to an object.
2. Description of the Related Art
From the viewpoints of environmental protection and recycling, rewritable papers capable of recording and erasing information repeatedly have attracted attention lately. The rewritable papers typically include a substrate and a thermally-reversible recording layer formed on the substrate by applying leuco dye and oxidizer to the substrate. The recording layer is relatively colored and decolored by heating the recording layer appropriately. To record information on the recording layer, thermal printers having a thermal head to heat the recording media are required. Since the structures of thermal printers are relatively simple and thermal printers can be easily maintained, more and more thermal printers are expected to be used in place of laser printers employing the Carlson process in the future.
This type of thermal printer typically includes an erasing plate and an erasing roller erasing information previously recorded on a recording medium before new information is recorded on the recording medium. Such an erasing plate or the like employs a technique in which a heat accumulating member, having high heat capacity, disposed on the rear surface of the heat generating member is included to compensate the heat amount required in an effective area of a heat generating member to erase recorded information when the recording medium is heated (hereinafter abbreviated to “effective area”), thereby stably maintaining the temperature distribution of the effective area of the heat generating member even when continuous heating of the recording medium is required (see, for example, Patent Document 1). According to the technique described in the Patent Document 1, however, since the heat from a heat generating member is conducted through a protection layer having low heat capacity, it is required that the heating characteristics of the heat generating member itself be even enough to continuously and accurately perform erasing of the information recorded on the recording media, which would be a cause of increasing the cost of the device.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-317899